Monday, July 18, 2011

From North Korea: "Tell the world we are starving"

"I went up to see what they were looking at," recalled 63-year-old Lee Sun Ok, a North Korean farmer who had come to the city to sell some small rice-cakes she had made to earn money. "And then I saw it was the body of an old man with a piece of cloth placed over his face.

"I asked if he had fallen down because he was sick, but the people shook their heads and said, 'No, he was just too hungry and died for lack of something to eat.'"

Mrs Lee's account is among shocking first hand testimony about the dramatically worsening living conditions in the secretive Stalinist state obtained by The Sunday Telegraph last week.